Diplomats, Guns & Money …

Though the news was overshadowed by discussions about health care and budget cuts and police procedures in Massachusetts, this week saw the Obama administration take some big steps toward reshaping the American arts of war and peace, putting money where its mouth has been — strategically speaking.

The result was a knock-down drag-out fight that included the deeply weird sight of Sen. Barbara Boxer defending a war machine against that well-known dove, Sen. John McCain, and despite a veto threat from the Democratic President.

Ultimately, of course, the Senate blinked first, and it looks likely that the House — which still has the F-22 in its version of the defense budget — will follow suit and fold.

But the decision to halt the F-22 line was just one of several moves the Obama administration made this week toward a radical redesign of American power — and not necessarily the most significant one.

Also significant was the announcement Monday that Gates plans to shift money around in his current budget to boost the Army’s strength by 22,000, creating some breathing room for troops hammered by the demands of two simultaneous wars.

Unlike the F-22, which has yet to see use in the current conflicts, the increased troop strength is immediately and directly applicable to the battle in Iraq and Afghanistan, Gates noted — and the expansion will cost less than $100 million, which Gates snarked would be easy to find if Congress would stop foisting “pet projects” on the Pentagon.

(What’s the link between money for foreign service officers and money for F-22s? As fans of Von Clausewitz know, the diplomacy budget is a continuation of the military budget by other means.)

“What we are seeing here is the end of the Cold War consensus on the role of military power in US security policy,” the Lexington Institute’s Daniel Goure told me this week.

“Since 1945, the consensus view was that while foreign policy, aid, etc. were necessary, they had only limited value in ensuring national security … deterrence was based on military power,” he said. “Now, nearly twenty years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, a new perspective on national security is forming… that security can be based on more than just military power.”

“As a result, there is a budget shift away from major warfighting capabilities and towards so-called soft power.”

Gates has been the engine of this shift, in many ways, more so than Clinton or even Obama. The SecDef’s ideal would be a military that devotes about half of its resources to conventional warfare, about 10 percent to irregular warfare and the rest to programs that are good at both.

(Trivia: The F-35 may also become the nation’s last manned fighters, to be replaced by the growing fleet of robot planes that are versatile, deadly, and relatively cheap.)</p)

Whether Gates will succeed is hard to say — there is still pushback on the F-22 decision, and others have tried and failed to force military change in defiance of the defense industry.

If he does succeed, how significant is this change? After all, the military evolves and changes all the time, and the changes Gates is pushing are less than the changes seen between the Reagan-Bush and Clinton Administrations or from Nixon-Ford to Carter, Goure said.

Boston University’s Andrew Bacevich went even further, suggesting that the entire notion that the F-22 decision signals a major change by the Obama-Gates-Clinton triumvirate is overblown.

“The tendency is to interpret the killing of the F22 program as some sort of great victory over the military-industrial complex. It’s not,” said Bacevich, one of the most prominent critics of the DoD’s current focus on counterinsurgency strategy.

“A relevant historical comparison is Robert McNamara’s face-off with Curtis LeMay in the early 1960s over the proposed B70 bomber. LeMay said it was essential. McNamara (like Gates today on the F22) said it was a waste of money. McNamara won — and so instead of building the B70 we spent tons of money expanding the ICBM force far beyond what was required. That’s what’s happening today: Gates has killed the F22 so as to have more money to spend buying a couple thousand F35s.”

But other analysts say the Gates plan is indeed a big shift — not only in the emerging shape of the nation’s military-diplomatic corps, but in the way that shift is happening.

“Typically, following a major conflict, what we do is we just downsize the military — we just remove numbers from the force. so you end up with a smaller version of the same force you had,” said Todd Harrison, Fellow for Defense Budget Studies at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.

But this time, Harrison said, the military and state department are being redesigned in the midst of two wars and a global economic collapse — the policy equivalent of changing the transmission in a 1970 Triumph TR6 while barreling down the road at 110 mph.

“We’re not going down in size … we are basically transforming the thing on the fly,” Harrison said. “This is a radical departure from what we had done in the past.”

Weigh in: Is Goldilocks Gates opting for too much hard power? Too soft? Or just right?